As New Orleans officials deployed to protect thousands of revelers flocking to the French Quarter on New Year’s Eve, they parked a police SUV to block the entrance to Bourbon Street, a packed pedestrian thoroughfare long seen as vulnerable to a vehicular-ramming attack. The SUV left a large gap, allowing the driver of a pickup truck to turn onto Bourbon Street hours after midnight. It was not a momentary security lapse: At various times earlier that evening, the gap between the police SUV and the nearest structural obstacle was more than twice the width of the attacker’s truck, a Washington Post examination of visual evidence found. A short distance down the block, the truck drove over a hydraulic metal barrier that officials had planned to raise that night to prevent unauthorized vehicles from driving down Bourbon Street, according to a New Year’s Eve road-closure plan. The barrier was left down. Beyond that point, there were no anti-vehicle barricades or police vehicles blocking the path of the truck that night.
The driver sped virtually unimpeded for almost 1,000 feet, plowing through a crowd of people until he struck a piece of construction equipment that happened to be there for a project unrelated to security. Fourteen people were killed and dozens injured. Police have acknowledged that the driver managed to bypass security safeguards, with one official saying they had a plan and yet “the terrorist defeated it.” The Post’s block-by-block accounting of events on New Year’s Eve and into the next morning found major security lapses and shortcomings in the street-closure plan. Among the findings: The hydraulic metal barricade that was not raised was the only anti-vehicle barrier planned on Bourbon Street itself. “There were a number of ways to successfully protect this street from a ramming attack, and it appears that none of them were used,” security expert Don Aviv said. Aviv is chief executive of Interfor International, a company commissioned by the French Quarter Management District to study security measures in 2019. The FBI had warned New Orleans officials years earlier that Bourbon Street was vulnerable. The mayor at the time pushed to bolster public safety infrastructure after a deadly 2016 vehicle-ramming attack in Nice, France, that helped prompt cities around the world to rethink security. That year, officials announced a $40 million public safety project that included the installation of metal posts known as bollards that could slide on tracks into the middle of Bourbon Street to temporarily block vehicles at critical points near each cross street. Mardi Gras beads and other debris jammed the mechanisms, rendering the system unusable, officials said.
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